America has long been called a melting pot. People came from all over the world, and the combined cultures merged the best of the best in a stew of all the ingredients. At least that’s what I was told in public school. What was never really talked about, or maybe it wasn’t understood, was the…
Whether you enjoy just watching whitetail deer in the area or pursuing them through the forests and fields during the Ohio hunting season, their presence is the combined success of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) and a very adaptable creature. At the turn of the last century, whitetail deer were extirpated in the…
Smack. “Well, that one isn’t making it to Mexico,” I said to myself as what I presumed was a Monarch butterfly bounced off the windshield at 70 mph. While their distinctive black and orange colors warn birds of their poisonous nature (something Viceroy butterflies mimic to enjoy the same protection), it doesn’t mean the butterfly…
If curiosity killed the cat, I guess I should consider myself lucky I’m not a cat. I’ve been bit, pinched, and stung by a variety of critters. Sometimes it was clearly my fault. Others, I was just in the right place at the wrong time. But without a doubt, the species that has gotten me…
They’re nearly here: the months that end in “R” and signify Ohio fall hunting seasons. The opening day for tree squirrels and Mourning Dove seasons starts Sept. 1. In Ohio, small game hunting season openers are some of the state’s longest-standing traditions. When I passed the Ohio hunter education course and got my first hunting…
It’s easy to get caught up with what’s right in front of us. In the human situation, while we might see and comprehend with perspective, we’re bound by gravity and typically orient ourselves with the ground. But high in the tree canopies above us, many different species of wildlife exist in a world with a…
50 years ago, “A River Runs Through It” by author Norman Maclean was published. A semi-auto biographical take on his life in Montana, it brought trout fishing as a near religious experience to new audiences. In 1992, Robert Redford put the book on the big screen. With Brad Pitt in focus and the Rocky Mountains…
You couldn’t miss it. Either inside on the news or outside on the horizon, the haze created by northern wildfires hundreds of miles from Ohio was unavoidable. While often reports on events are over blown, that wasn’t the case this time. Fire has always been a shaping force on the environment, and that was definitely…
I get it. Fishing might seem boring to some people. The historic image of a man in a straw hat napping on the shore with a bamboo pole seems about as close to doing nothing as one can get. I think there’s a time for that. At the polar opposite are modern big-money fishing tournaments…
When this country’s first 13 colonies declared independence from Britain 250 years ago in 1776, it probably didn’t make the local news here in the “Ohio Country” as the colonists would refer to it. Indigenous people, including Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo and Wyandot, were the only inhabitants and they likely had other things to do. But…